A (not so) short primer on political parties

 

Man, it seems that (again!) there was something wrong with my forecast for the USA presidential election: I dismissed too cavalierly the possibility of a major kerfuffle between the major parties about who had won, and a full blown constitutional crisis, along the lines presented in the Atlantic article by Barton Gellman that I did link. As of today (Friday, three days after the vote took place), we still don’t know the result (so at least it is clear that there is no “blue wave”, and that the support for Trump was once more dramatically underestimated in the polls, no matter how much the pollsters said they had learned and adjusted after 2016), and the current president has, true to form, already declared that he has won the election and that all further count should be stopped (not recount this time, like in Florida in 2000, but simple original, honest-to-God vote counting, as counting all the votes, legitimate or not, may endanger his “win”). If you were a Russian or a Chinese operative wanting to weaken the USA and to obliterate every remnant of influence it may still exert in the international arena you could not have engineered a more favorable outcome for your intentions…

Be it as it may, the one thing I believe I got right is that what this sorry soap opera confirms is that the cycle of US supremacy in international affairs is over, and this kind of drama just highlights it. Regardless of who finally gets to the White House, who would look, in the next four years (or in the next forty, for what it’s worth) to Washington for approval, inspiration, legitimacy or even financing? a country that spends an inordinate amount of time in a seemingly never-ending electoral campaign, that after such endless electioneering is mercifully ended, cannot agree on who has won the most votes because it uses some ballot counting processes that would look more in place in the XVIII century than in the XXI, that in the meantime cannot decide on what kind of help or mere economic relief its citizens need in the midst of a pandemic (a pandemic on which it can’t even agree on how to slow down because every imaginable measure has been politicized and rejected beforehand by a half of the population only because it has been embraced by the other half) the likes of which have not been experienced in a lifetime, where half of the electorate is ready to reelect a patently unfit, corrupt buffoon whose only merit (in their eyes, not mine!) is to make their shared opponents foam at the mouth? Not many, for sure, so I won’t dwell more in their unremarkable fate (all decadences look alike, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I have a more exalted one to look at when I want to ponder how mutable the fortunes of the world are, and how swift the fall from grace can seem).

What I want to dwell on, instead, is how their main political parties evolved in the last couple of centuries until they ended as a dead weight around the neck of the social body, beyond possible salvation, and how those in the rest of the world maybe moving in a similar direction, and thus similarly fated to end in the same undesirable place. I will start by remembering my readers that political organizations are groups of people with pre-defined roles (and limited freedom of action, as those roles constrain their choices of what they can publicly do) that share a common goal, namely the improvement of the group they self-identify with. That improvement typically takes the form of a zero-sum game, as it requires that said group takes control of a higher percentage of the “social product” (it is not necessary at this point to get in more detail of what the social product consists in: depending on the type of society it can be honor, recognition by other groups, voting rights, increased possession of material goods, freedom to engage in certain socially sanctioned activities, ability to dictate to others what they should listen, or see, or think, and whatnot). An interesting case is posed by people with multiple allegiances, belonging to multiple political organizations that may pursue potentially conflicting goals, but we will leave that case aside for the moment and deal with it towards the end of this post (or in the next one).

As I have mentioned in other places, durable and still recognizable political organizations in the modern sense appear in our civilization in the eve of the French Revolution. Before that we had the ur-political group, the family, and the nation state, and little in-between (other than some fleeting alliance of families like the Ghibellines and Guelphs of northern Italy I mentioned in a previous post). The French Revolution is considered a pivotal moment in (the Western) world history because for the first time, then, we see distinct groups of people becoming conscious of their common interests outside the family and within the nation, to be pursued separately and mostly in opposition to other similar groups. And because one of said groups (that initially identified themselves as the “third state”, formed by all those that were non-priest and non-noble, but that in the end was formed essentially by the urban bourgeoisie) was wildly successful, achieving not only its initial goals of getting a say in how the realm was managed (specially, and closest to its commercial heart, how taxes were levied) but getting a monopoly of power that would last actually to our present days, any other attempt at configuring political identities, popular movements and parties claiming to further the particular interests of a certain segment of the population have tended to follow the template set by the delegates of the National Constituent Convention (where the delegates of the mentioned third state, representatives of the majority, were seated at the left of the tribune, whilst the ones for the nobility and the church seated at the right).

Since then we have had, in all the West, two main parties: one purporting to represent “the majority of the population”, only not any majority, but specifically the one with less means and less wealth, and another one representing the “richest ones”. Let us call them, adhering to extended usage, “progressives” and “conservatives”, and try to clarify a bit more what sets them apart, in terms of who they are, how they can identify themselves (and distinguish from the other parties) and how they necessarily formulate their goals of increased power/ recognition/ wealth:

·         Progressives, as we have defined them, are marked by two features. They represent more than half of the populace, and that segment has to include the poorest ones. In different historical moments they have tried to extend their reach towards higher incomes (an extreme has been reached recently with the claim, coined by the recently deceased David Graeber, for whom I have a lot of sympathy, of being the “99%”, and thus excluding only the richer 1%), and the identification factor tends to overlap with the professional activity of its members (as the latter determines to a great extent the position within the social hierarchy). This party is then the natural home of peasants (specially landless ones: sharecroppers in UK, métagers in France, temporeros in Spain, etc.), industrial workers, apprentices, maidservants, small shopkeepers, low-level public servants, etc. As they earn less than the national average, they understandably tend to favor redistribution, the more of it there is the better (as for them as a group it is a net gain: the more it is taken from the higher earners and given to them in the form of direct transfers, subsidies, unemployment, healthcare and social security the more resources they have for leading more fulfilling lives), enacted usually by progressive taxation (that taxes at increasingly higher margins the higher income brackets). However, and equally understandably, that redistribution “from without” (tax more those that belong to the upper classes, who constitute this party’s “other”) stops at the group’s frontier, and becomes an ideal of solidarity within it. Nietzsche’s vitriolic “morals” could be construed as a denunciation of such solidarity (that he denounced as “slave mentality” in the usual friendly and equanimous tone he used with anybody he didn’t like -essentially everybody ever…). They identify themselves by their “unsophisticated” tastes in entertainment (“lowbrow” culture, as what has been called “highbrow” was revealed by Pierre Bourdieu and the like to be a coded and costly way to identify who belonged to the higher classes), which they construe as being more “natural”, more “wholesome” and “authentic” than the stilted, contrived, rootless and artificial cosmopolitanism of the elites.

·         Conservatives, on the other hand, cannot claim to represent a majority, as what singles them out is precisely the fact that they are “better off” (have more means at their disposal, more assets, more instruction, more influence, more status) than the average citizen (although some weird statistical distribution of wealth or income could be imagined in which the median took a value well above the average, and thus more than half the people could have “more than average” of the positional goods of which there is a limited supply, in real life normally the opposite is the case). That was not a problem at all in the old times, where such state of affairs could be maintained indefinitely by sheer force (as the ability to exert force was highly correlated with wealth and riches, so the rich ones were also the powerful ones, and could count with superior manpower -and later on, firepower- to keep the masses on their place), but with the advent of representative democracy (that has inched, slowly and haltingly, but surefootedly, towards the principle of “one person, one vote”) it has been much more tricky to operate and sustain. As we advanced in one of the posts on the USA elections, referring to the Republican party, there have been essentially two strategies open to them (and of course, both have been used extensively):

a)       “Divide and conquer”, splitting the opposition in two and disenfranchising as many as possible of those, and thus having only to extend the population you fight for to something in the vicinity of a 30-40% of the total. This is the path followed in Europe, where conservatives have successfully reached power many times with a 40% of the vote, as the remaining 60% was more or less evenly split between social democrats and communists (depending on the laws for converting the percentage of the vote into representatives, it may further require more imaginative alliances). It has to be noted that 40% of the vote could be cast by roughly a 25-30% of the total population, if abstention was high enough.

b)      “Obfuscate”, but as the latest USA presidential elections show, governing a majority of the population having the interests of only a minority of it in mind is a difficult exercise of tightrope walking, and the smallest failure may spell doom (in the form of loss of power to the majority, which would then enact the dreaded confiscation/ redistribution). A better alternative is to try to convince said majority that your positions, devised to benefit primarily those that are better off, are magically beneficial to everybody, including the poorer and worst-off parts of the polity. Something that was given intellectual legitimacy by John Rawls (that formulated what he called the “difference principle”, according to which the only deviations from equality that are morally admissible are those that would make the least advantaged members of society better off) and then was bastardized (hence the term I used for naming this strategy instead of “creating more wealth” of “enhancing the collective welfare”) in bullshitty theories like trickle-down economics (popularized in the motto “a rising tide lifts all boats”, that conveniently forgets that the big yachts tend to be lifted much more than the modest dinghies)

Regardless of the strategy best adapted to each social condition and historical moment, what all conservative parties share is a set of goals favorable to their constituency, centered around placing limits to (or right away eliminating) redistribution, allowing the wealthier to retain their wealth (which requires that differences in wealth are not only allowed or grudgingly put up with, but legitimized, even glamorized as inherently virtuous and desirable). That is, they really cannot aspire to increase their share of the social product, as they already own most of it, so their goal is the maintenance of the status quo, and derived from such maintenance, the justification of the traditions and ideologies that produced it (the more remote in the past the better), be that justification economic, religious, or identitarian (more on that in a moment). Such ideology has crystalized of late in a general disdain for the state and its administration, seen as a machine for siphoning resources from those who have them (the rich) to those who do not (everybody else). Thus, the legislative movement of conservative parties everywhere is towards less state machinery, less government capabilities and less institutions that can check private individuals’ decisions (which has the twofold benefit of making the state less able to redistribute wealth and of justifying further reductions in taxes, a strategy known in the USA as “starve the beast”), and thus towards ever increasing “deregulation” (not because they specially love unregulated markets; the rich love markets regulated just enough to extract monopoly rents from them, only once that has been achieved they prefer a hands off approach from government so they can maximize their gains even more).

So for about the last two hundred years in the West those two sensibilities/ sets of goals have animated the two main political parties (although they sometimes have fragmented due to personal enmities between some of their leaders, corruption of the entrenched ones that drove a significant portion of the electorate away from them or the local irruption of some niche issue that attracted the attention of enough voters), occupying between them most of the space between the nation-state and the family, and presenting themselves as the only alternatives for those willing to consecrate part of their time (or their resources) to the improvement of the lot in life of the group they identified with by adopting a role in them (be it as mere voter, a not very demanding role, but with implications on how they see the world far beyond what the very modest time commitment may suggest, or as an active organizer or leader). Thus, this could be a first level analysis of the political landscape of every Western nation, were it not for a glaring omission that we should now address: nationalism.

Nationalism means a bunch of different things to different people. To some it is the source of all evil and bad things that happened in the XX century and to others a virtuous quality that any properly born and bred citizen should exhibit in his public life. From our perspective, a political organization is nationalist when it intends to represent all the people that share a common nationality, and has as its ultimate goal the improvement of the lot of said people. If the play between nations in the international arena is understood as zero-sum, such improvement would necessary come at the expense of other nations (others groups of self-identified peoples) and we would be talking of “aggressive” nationalism, bent on the extraction of resources from other countries by force, on occupation of foreign lands if needs be to better exploit them and to right away conquer additional “vital space” for its citizens (lebensraum), like the one practiced by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, Colonial France, Imperialist UK… If the identification of who actually belongs to the nation is done in some restrictive way, in order to single out some group within the legal citizens of the nation-state as being the “real” nation, we would be talking of “exclusionary” nationalism, like again the one of Nazi Germany before WWII (that excluded the Jews and, to a certain extent, the communists) or the one of white supremacists in the USA of today (that would exclude blacks, Hispanics and supposedly other racial minorities that got too uppity some of which, in practice, may be more tolerated). Both of those nationalisms are seen as morally repugnant by a majority of educated people nowadays… in the West, as in Asia there is not one but two rising powers that owe a part of its current success to having harnessed the power of a nationalism presented in benign terms as the only outlet for the political participation of its enormous population: both China and India (the first to a more advanced degree than the second) present the currently ruling parties (Chinese Communist Party and Bharatiya Janata -Indian’s People Party) as the sole “proper” way of participating in a collective endeavor and help other people like you get a better life. as such parties purport to represent the whole of society, they leave no legitimate space to try to organize and fight for better conditions for only a subset of it (in China that attempt would be illegal, while in India, still a functioning democracy with a rich history of progressive and conservative parties going back to its independence, it is still legal, albeit the governing majority is trying to at least delegitimize it, although it has so far fallen short of attempting to forbid it).

What we do have in the West (or at least in Europe) is a number of regionalist parties pretending to represent “the whole nation” in small geographic areas that do not constitute an administratively independent nation (Catalonia, Corsica, Wallonia, Scotland) and that typically take advantage of their ability to represent at least a percentage of the population of the territories on which they operate to exact advantages from “national” parties (traditional conservative or progressive ones) in exchange for their parliamentary support, that can be at times pivotal to keep them in power.

I will have more to say about those “small nationalists”, and about the degeneration of both progressive and conservative parties, in a next post on this topic, as this one has already exceeded my self-imposed limits on verbosity…

And here comes my forecast (USA Elections III)

 Having devoted my previous post to explain my patient readers why I think Donald J. Trump definitely deserves to lose this Tuesday, I am going to use this one to share why I think the (as of today, the very same day of the election, not that I’m taking enormous risks here!) more likely than not victory of Joe Biden doesn’t necessarily means that justice will be served, the good guys will win, the previous (mostly beneficent) state of the world will be restored and the Hegelian Spirit of History will resume its march towards greater equality/ self-consciousness/ happiness.

First, then, let’s review why said victory seems the most plausible option given what the polls say. If your are reading this blog and have the most passing acquaintance with the US political process you already know that the Washington Post’s aggregate of polls has Biden leading nationally with 10 points, the Economist’s model gives him a 95% of winning, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives him a 90%. It surely seems like a safe bet to say that Trump is basically toast and Biden will be the next US president, doesn’t it:

Regardless of the accuracy of the model (and I think it’s the most accurate out there, although with electoral model it is as with investment funds… past performance does not guarantee future returns), the polls are almost unanimous in giving Biden a substantial lead. Even the WSJ and Fox News (who you definitely wouldn’t accuse of having a pro-democrats bias!) are giving Biden an 8-10 points lead. However, it is indeed both concerning and surprising that such lead has been shrinking in the last couple of weeks (using again 538 data, it was 10.6 a week ago and on election day it has been reduced to 8.4):

It just baffles me that Trump’s number may have gone up from low 41 to mid 42’s in a week. I can’t fathom what may have motivated a full 1.5% of the American population to decide in the last minute, seeing what we have seen during the campaign, that they were supporting the orange one all the same (or I may fathom it, just have a look at the conservative press and it all boils down to the same old same old: judges and abortion, with a sprinkling of the economy -which for those guys ends up meaning lower taxes, gargantuan deficit be damned as long as it is incurred by a Republican: from a former never Trumper: vote for Trump!/ ). Equally baffling is that Trumps favorability ratings, that have not exceeded 50% during his whole presidency (probably a historically unprecedented feat, the guy never got to be approved by more than half of the population), have infinitesimally ticked upwards in this same last week of an ugly, partisan, rancorous and generally uninspiring campaign:

Probably that simply reflects the existence of a base of die-hard followers that reject on a fundamental level everything that comes from the mainstream media and, although generally dismissive of the president until now (maybe they saw how through all his talk of being a defender of conservative values he was in it only for himself), they have reacted against the deluge of last minute almost unanimous messages against him by finding him more endearing (the “enemy of my enemy” dynamic).

Can we then conclude that Trump is definitely toast, disconnect from all the network-induced drama of the ballot recount (that may take days, more on that in a moment) and come back in a week -or even better, in a month- to see how the transfer of power is taking shape to the new Biden administration? Well, not so fast. You probably also remember how polls and models were similarly bullish on Clinton four years ago, and yet… and surely already know that this time is different (isn’t it always and every time?), Biden’s lead has hold steadily since the beginning of the campaign (but that was four years ago, when Bien was not yet the candidate, or was he already?), is at this point much bigger than Clinton’s ever was, and thus it would require a much bigger error in the polls for Trump to play a similar upset this time. Let’s just remember how the 538 model looked like back then:

So yup, looked a bit more swingy back then, steadier this time, and a bigger lead (plus probably some adjustments and improvements in how pollsters adjust more realistically to the underlying composition of the electorate, weighing by education) means that the safest bet by far is that Biden wins the popular vote (few doubts about that one, really) AND the electoral college this time around. I very much agreed (a month ago) with Scott Sumner’s opinion that if Biden arrived to election day with an advantage above 5% in FiveThirtyEight’s poll aggregator, that should be enough to overcome the electoral college bias, plus the likely poll bias that may fail again to identify hypothetical “shy” Trump voters (Money Illusion election forecast ), and Biden has indeed arrived with 8.4% advantage, so I have little doubts. There has been no October surprise, there are almost no undecided voter this time that can unexpectedly break for one candidate or the other, more than 2/3 of the electorate have already cast their ballots, so I think it’s the ignominious end of the ignominious Trump era.

That is really the “easy” part of the forecast (anybody can just visit FiveThirtyEight and reach the same conclusion). The interesting part comes afterwards, knowing that even if Biden wins big, Trump may (and almost certainly will) contest the result to the bitter end (and, after Florida in 2000 and the amount of lawyers hired to litigate this until the second coming, nobody can tell where that bitter end lies). The fact that an inordinate amount of votes have been sent by mail this time, and that the myriad of electoral systems independently managed seem to be poorly prepared to deal with such deluge, plus the fact that it may very well happen that the composition of the electorate that choose to cast their vote by mail is not exactly the same as the one choosing to vote in person (with more democrats preferring the first option, and more republicans opting for the second), it is not far-fetched, doesn’t matter how much pundits and commentators have warned against such possibility, that we have a preliminary recount tilting more heavily towards Republicans than the end result, and that in certain, Republican controlled jurisdictions, there is some movement to cut short the completion of the vote counting. A number of journalists have already fleshed out such scenario (the most famous one is penned by Barton Gellman in The Atlantic: What if Trump refuses to concede? ) but I don’t think things will get that hairy. Still, the most likely scenario is a big enough victory for Biden (one that will be recognized, albeit grudgingly, by the likes of Fox News), contested all the same by Trump, with a bunch of suits trying to delegitimize the results in a bunch of swing states, suits that will slowly and haltingly be dismissed in the end (after many months) in different instances until nobody really pays much attention to them, but enough to have Trump claiming for the rest of his life that the election was stolen, that the future democratic administration is illegitimate, and, even worse, to have a fringe (but vociferous enough to have an oversized impact in subsequent public discourse) of the Internet, the conservative media and their dark corners of social network claim to the end of days that the “Deep State”, the “Cathedral”, the “Swamp” conned once again a gullible electorate (which will be colorfully described as a “coup”, a “conspiracy” and, of course, ultimately “treason” to the constitution and the sacrosanct founding principles of the commonweal), and restored in power a dark cabal of crypto-communists hellbent on destroying the republic in spite of the lack of “true” popular support for their extremist policies. The real impact of such holdovers and shrill sycophants in the future unfolding of events is likely to be minimal, so we don't really have to pay much attention to them.

Which is essentially recognizing that "haters gonna hate" and  all that. The really important, underlying trend we have to pay attention to is the fact that the American republic long ago passed the point of no return regarding its viability (an interesting historical question would be when exactly was that point crossed: when they chose a black president and one of its major parties decided that thwarting him was more important than presenting a viable government alternative? when its liberal elites decided virtue signaling was more important than giving equal opportunities to the less educated parts of the population, even if they didn’t share their multicultural, intersectional sensibilities?). Lincoln famously declared “a house divided cannot stand” and Americans have shown the world they are a house not just divided, but irreparably, acrimoniously, vitriolically so. Each half of the country would be happier losing an eye if the other half lost both than keeping their eyes altogether, a sure sign of decadence. Sadly, most Americans still consider themselves exceptional, a “city on a hill”, an “indispensable nation”, and naively think that the rest of the world counts on them to act as the Sheriff in any international dispute gone awry and the final arbiter of truth, justice, fairness, goodness and progress, while said rest of the world has been watching in horror at the clown show that have been the last four years, crowned by the most incompetent response to this troubled time’s sanitary emergency. I live in Spain, a country that probably deserves the title of world champion in decadence (one that took place in a shorter interval than the similarly storied one of the Roman empire, happening between the beginning of the XVIth century, when Spain dominated one of the vastest empires history has known, an empire on which “the sun never set”, and the end of the XVIIth, when it became the laughingstock of Europe, whose leading nations shamelessly fought  about who to sit in its throne, without caring much for what the nationals of the sad place may opine). Such stupendous fall from the heights of inernational influence to being a backwater has helped us develop a fine instinct for identifying it in others. So we can assert with some historical perspective that the USA is already in full decadence mode (as already identified by some of its leading intellectuals: The Decadent Society ) and that, regardless of who wins this election (or the next ten ones), decadence is a one way street. One you enter that path, it’s weakening, loss of prestige, loss of international influence, loss of confidence and internal mistrust and division all the way down to run-of-the-mill country. And, worst of all, all those undesirable events will exacerbate internal strife, as they will be blamed by each half of the population on the other half (with the eventual, and mostly imaginary, help of some external evildoers, the appeal to non-existent external threats being another surefire sign that a country is on a downward trajectory).

So, considered with a wide enough perspective, it really, doesn’t matter who is finally awarded today’s election, how long and chaotic is the process to reach such decision, and finally who governs for the next four years (likely torturous and conflictive ones). America, and by extension the West, and our current dominant reason, are all doomed because of underlying forces that run deeper, and are much stronger, than what any single individual can control. For those unduly excited by the perspective of a Biden restoration, and a return to normal, and the belief in the arch of history bending towards justice, we should remember that after Nero, an emperor that most historians consider extremely bad who governed from 54 to 68 AC, the empire still knew its years of maximum territorial expansion under Trajan (98 – 117 AD) and Hadrian (117 – 138 AD). The question, then, is if Trump will be like Nero, a minor blip in a still ascendant trajectory, or rather more like an  Elagabalus (218 – 22 AD), after whom it was really all decadence and degeneration until the final collapse, with very little in the form of respite or recovery of past glories. Not needing to go to such lengths of historical comparison, I found this article by Branko Milanovic to provide some balanced and equipoised perspective: What are the stakes (less than you think!)

To be able to answer that question, we have to remove the veil that for decades has obscured the view of what America’s two main parties (considered as political organizations, something they are appreciably no more) have been defending, and whose interests have shaped their programs and their achievements when in power. But such removal will have to wait until my next post on the issue.

Why I don’t dig Trump (USA Elections II)

 

Reading my previous post I realize I have deviated from my usual style of sober and detached analysis and indulged in what amounts to a florid collection of belittling epithets towards the current USA administration and, most pointedly, its nominal leader, the 45^th president. But heaping a lot of adjectives, florid or not, a solid argument does not make, and I owe it to my readers (and, to a certain extent, to myself) to flesh out what may be understood as an outburst, long on emotion but short on sober reasoning. I will develop, then, in this post my arguments for disliking Trump and his clique (which right now seems to comprise the whole of the republican party, although the prospect of electoral defeat seems to be causing the first cracks in what until now has been a rock-solid union), and how my particular misgivings maybe entirely irrelevant for the future direction of American society, as this “most important election ever” probably will decide little, and in the great scheme of things be entirely irrelevant. I will present my objections to the current occupant of the White House under three headings: linguistic, professional and political (regardless of alignment), and devote a fourth one (in a separate post) to how they may play out in the remaining two weeks until Americans vote, and what may happen afterwards.

You may not have noticed it, but I love dearly the English tongue. It’s not the language I grew up learning, but I mastered it soon enough, and since my childhood I’ve revered its richness, the vastness of its seemingly endless vocabulary which gives it the ability to transmit the subtler nuances and develop the most sophisticated arguments, be it from cool reason or passionate emotion. If I had devoted to guitar playing half the time I have devoted to improving my language ability (by reading or writing in English) I may not have reached the level of Jimi Hendrix (blessed by the guitar Gods with a unique amount of natural talent that simply cannot be equaled), but I would be at least at the level of Tom Petty or Bob Dylan (not master players, but competent enough). If I had spent lifting weights a quarter of the time I’ve spent scribbling and reading just XVI and XVII century English poetry and philosophy I wouldn’t be at Dimitry Klokov’s level, but I would have probably qualified for the Spanish national championship in weightlifting. Now, I don’t expect a politician (English-speaking or otherwise) to have the mastery of language of Shakespeare, but I do appreciate a bare minimum of proficiency in its use. And Jesus Christ, is listening to Donald J. Trump a chore for a lover of English! the guy mistreats it every time he opens his mouth, uses a syntax that would seem coarse for a second grader and limits himself to a vocabulary that a deprived bricklayer of a Gujarati village would already consider poor. I recognize for some enthusiasts of the Don that’s a willful, wily conceit, a show of his genius, as he voluntarily controls the sophistication of his speech (he doesn’t seem to write anything longer than his bombastic and absurdly baroque signature) to adapt it to the level of his audience (some praise! that essentially assumes that the average level of the American voter is that of a semi-illiterate moron, which even in my most elitist and hifalutin days I’d consider an unduly harsh slander)… something I would believe if I had seen him in other environments showing his ability to express himself competently and to convey some elaborate thoughts (when addressing the UN general assembly, say). I’m afraid the real reason behind his apparent communicational shortcomings is that there is really nothing behind the façade, but a similarly undeveloped, unsophisticated, inarticulate intelligence (that is, not much intelligence at all).   

Which leads us to the consideration of to what extent we can say he has taken seriously his responsibilities as commander in chief and president of all Americans. We may stop for a moment to reflect what such exalted position requires, other than communicate clearly with the population what direction he wants the country to follow (something we have already settled he is just not very good at). In a presidential system with separation of powers, like the American, the president (who has no legislative or judicial power and delegates to the secretaries of his choice the executive power vested on the government) is supposed to be a representative of the Nation, both internally and externally. Somebody they look up to, that inspires them to be the best possible version of themselves and shows to other dignitaries (or to the public of foreign lands) the greatness and the promise of the whole people. Who embodies the virtues they want to project, assuages allies and appears fearsome to enemies. From that standpoint, as I mentioned, the Trump administration has been an abysmal failure. Not only America’s image is at an all-time low between its traditional allies, but adversaries like Russia, North Korea or China do not seem to have been much impressed by 45^th bluster. As for his ability to inspire the best angels of the inhabitants’ nature… I’d refer to the comments of his former chief of staff, sadly recognizing he had been more a divider than a uniter. We may see what election day brings, but it is difficult to find somebody in modern political history, in the USA or abroad, who has tried less to expand his base and to attract people who did not initially vote for him to his camp (at least as long as we circumscribe our search to nominal democracies, I reckon that Stalin, Pol-Pot and the like where even less gracious than Trump towards possible dissenters and non-sympathizers).

Of course, being perceived by almost everybody with an opinion as a complete failure at his day job is not something that probably would have fazed our man, as the idea of measurable professional competence seem to be as alien to him as feeling sympathy for anybody outside his immediate circle (or even inside it, given how he has treated longtime allies like his erstwhile lawyer/ fixer Michael Cohen) and, furthermore, he seems bone-chillingly convinced of his excellency on that area (as in any other area, really). And it makes me wonder to what extent he may be so self-deluded as to not realize just how incompetent he is. Although, come to think about it, I have had bosses like that (heck, I’ve been like that myself), who could pronounce the most unbelievable, bald-faced lies with total conviction because they had persuaded themselves first of its veracity. In the case of Trump, the first and foremost lie seems to be that he is an able businessman, the inspirational leader of a vast and successful company (Trump Co. yesterday, the US of A today) that underwent multiple bankruptcies and is nowadays deeply in the red with no viable plan to get back to profitability; a visionary strategist that is unable to articulate his strategy; a master dealmaker that is incapable of closing any deal, be it with a foreign leader or with a Congress dominated by his own party in the first half of his mandate; a sly operator and judge of the value of his subordinates that found it supremely difficult to keep in his team anybody with a shred of conscience, that keeps being left by his underlings who unfailingly sign book deals in which they portray him as a bumbling idiot… If “managing” is a science, or at least a craft (or, more humbly, what Alasdair MacIntyre would call a “practice”), and one whose skills and capabilities could be profitably put to use in the highest echelons of political leadership, as conservative parties everywhere tend to argue, Trump has shown to be supremely bad at it. But Alas! he played a successful, accomplished manager in a TV show and that seems to have been enough for his followers to make up their minds and stick with that image through four years of utter chaos.

And he certainly seems to have enough of those followers around him (or in channels where he seems to pick most of his opinions, both about the world and about himself, like Fox News and One America News Network) to stay convinced of his own greatness, and the unalloyed depravity and baselessness of any hint of criticism. Not the kind of balanced, unbiased, poised views you would want a true leader to be able to ponder… Which leads us finally to the last aspect of this sad business that makes me so wary of the whole thing. For those with eyes to see, it was crystal clear since he announced his campaign that Donald J. Trump was doing it for the same reason he had done every single thing in his life: to enrich himself, to gain status, to satisfy his own (apparently insatiable) ego. Of course, getting the vote of enough people required him to at least pretend he would have their best interest in mind, he would “fight” for them (remember his leitmotiv of “American carnage” during his first campaign? of course you remember, he is still campaigning along the same themes as if he hadn’t been the president during the last four years!) but I cannot avoid thinking that you had to be extraordinarily naïve to believe him even for a single millisecond. The interesting question, at this point, of course, is how could so many people fall for it? enough, at least, to give him an electoral college majority (even after losing the popular vote by a historically unprecedented margin).

But before I attempt to answer that question I want to note how paradigmatically Trump exemplifies the process of degeneration of political organizations towards which I already pointed a couple of posts ago (How organizations decay ). When a political organization (like the republican or the democratic party) has exhausted its ability to find innovative solutions that can effectively improve the collective well-being/ recognition/ life-satisfaction of its members (as part of a group with which they self-identify) it stops being able to adequately reward them (remember that belonging to an organization always comes with a cost, in terms of more limited freedom, as it imposes the constrains associated with the role members have to assume within it) and thus it becomes an economic organization ,in which each member is really looking out first and foremost for himself (remember, economic organizations are purely transactional, and people join them just to improve their own individual status, the rest of the group be damned… so they stay as long as the status they derive form it, typically in the form of a salary, compensates the freedom of choice they forgo). Political parties in particular become resource allocation machines that reward exclusively their card-carrying members with benefits and sinecures, while the voters they purport to represent are left in the lurch, to be remembered only when the next electoral cycle comes around and they have to be “milked” again, doesn’t matter what unashamed lies they have to be told (in the American case, things like that Roe vs. Wade will be finally repealed, a bunch of inexistent legislation against gun ownership that the other party is supposedly preparing will be blocked and taxes will not be raised, of which only the latter has any real chance of happening).

The novelty of Trump, then, is how bald-faced the lie has become. Even his frequent direct contacts with his fervent base (those otherwise unexplainable rallies he kept on celebrating in the middle of his presidency when the next election was still years away) are for him a way of maximizing the benefits he extracts from his position (in terms of adulation and unconditional approval of an adoring crowd, something it is obvious he relishes like few other pleasures). As is the chance to go on TV and be able to free-associate in front of the nation for hours on end (something that all autocrats, aspiring or otherwise, seem to love), embarrassing as it may appear to any sober external observer. As is the blatant host of conflicts of interest that have bedeviled his administration (from having foreign dignitaries, and his own secret service, staying in his money-losing properties while the American taxpayers pay for it to nominating his daughter and son-in-law to unspecified positions in his administration, even if that meant forcing the vetting process to allay the suspicions of his own intelligence agency that they may be compromised). Profit maximization through and through, intended just for him (who is, according to his own narrative, already very, very rich, a pretense that rested on shaky ground since day one and has become more difficult to maintain after the publication by the New York Times of his famed tax returns). It is like he keeps on saying “I’m milking you all to get even richer” and his adherents just nod along their approval, assuming that is how it has been all along since the beginning of the world, and any possible alternative leader would do the same, and they don’t mind being fleeced as long as the one doing the fleecing says he is “one of them”.

In a brilliant piece economist Branko Milanovic recently accused Trump of being the most refined embodiment of “neoliberalism” (Trump and neoliberalism ), and that he represents the “invasion of the economic into the political sphere”. I think that, rather than an invasion, what he signals is the complete substitution of one by the other. With Trump, a whole set of the population is in fact throwing the towel, assuming that collective representation is pointless (seen from a racial perspective, because they have been told that collective representation in the end meant that “dark skinned people” got more, and they themselves got less in exchange) and that everybody should be in it just for themselves, should pursue their own egoistic ends without much caring or looking out for others. Which, from the point of view of the elites, the best prepared, the winners of the economic game, is a superb proposition, because all those disenchanted voters that feel ecstatic because Trump, their champion, is “owning the libs” and making them foam at the mouth, would be a terrible threat if aligned with those same liberals against those enjoying the highest incomes and the highest social status (they may ask for anathemas like redistribution through taxation, universal health care and who knows what else!). Sixteen years ago Thomas Frank wondered, in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How it was possible that so many white working-class voters were aligning themselves with political positions deeply inimical with their “economic” interests. The question was wrongly posed. What they were doing was giving up the “political” altogether and following those that encouraged them to pursue their own economic interest (which, what a lucky coincidence! would allow the plutocrats financing that encouragement to benefit nicely through tax reduction and deregulation), something that by definition is done alone, in isolation from the rest of the polity. And it was their gradual defection from the Democratic party what would enable the republicans to cling to power, both at the state and the federal level, for years to come, in spite of the demographic headwinds they were experiencing (decline of the white and rural vote as a percentage of the total), as would be spectacularly manifested in the unexpected outcome of the 2016 election.

As for the implications of such analysis for the current election, they will have to wait until my next post!

The wonder of Trump & Co (USA Elections!)

I once declared myself to be a “political junkie”, only not of the political process of my home country, which I find boring, predictable and uninteresting, but of the USA, which I back then considered a harbinger of what awaited most developed economies, and now consider more and more a warning of what may befall them if they are not cautious and let their inner demons loose (as the Americans have done). However, although I’ve been following the 2020 presidential election (the campaign of which seemed to start somewhere around the 2^nd of January of 2017, right after inauguration) I haven’t felt like blogging about it, as, exciting as it may have appeared on the surface, I have found it actually quite boring. Boring, predictable and uninteresting like my own country’s politics are indeed, unintuitive as it may sound, the adjectives best describing the whole improbable presidency of Donald J. Trump, for reasons I will detail in a moment (just a question of having the right analytical framework, which makes the otherwise unexplainable seem mundane). But a little of history, first.

The mostly unexpected triumph of Trump in 2016 was but an advance of a development I had predicted for the next electoral cycle: the realization by a substantial portion of the white working class that they really didn’t have that many interests in common with the other members of the Democratic coalition (which, simplifying a little bit, we could characterize as feminist women, highly educated and credentialed professionals, racial minorities and non-closeted non-heterosexuals -I just can’t seem to keep track of the amount of capital letters required to identify them properly, so I’ll just define them negatively, no slight or disdain intended).

Not only were their interests different ,and I’m not thinking just in economic terms here… aesthetic preferences have been trending for decades in more and more divergent directions between the mostly rural, nationalist, Nascar-watching, country-music-hearing, gun-toting part of the population and the urban, cosmopolitan, NBA-enjoying, rap-and-hip-hop-listening mostly gun-free part, and it is nigh impossible to consider yourself part of the same community as people that employ their time, idolize public figures and even dress themselves in forms so alien to you, but even their self-image was growingly distinct, one celebrating “traditional” American-ness (as behooves a conservative party: baseball cap, T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s, driving a Lincoln Navigator or a Harley fat boy) and the other more open to “alternative” or simply up-to-date looks (won’t even try to describe them, as my age and quintessential un-coolness would painfully show). The moment you cannot identify with your supposed political co-religionaries even from a purely aesthetic point of view (but remember my distinction between political organizations and religious ones! it is the former we are talking about here, not the latter!) in the sense of feeling “at home” between them, of “seeing” yourself as a member of a single group to which they also belong, it is impossible for you to claim to adhere to the same political party, and to collectively pursue with them a common set of goals.

So it came to be that Trump was elevated to the highest office of the land, probably as much to his surprise as to any political analyst’s, which found it hard to fathom how the nation could have chosen such a buffoonish, evidently unfit individual, as president. But chose him they did (admittedly through the vagaries of the electoral college, but those are the rules of the electoral game there), and for four years the republic had to endure the most bombastic, ludicrous, shambolic, unhinged, splenetic, scurrilous, corrupt, bigoted, uninformed, farcical, preposterous, delusional, discombobulated, deranged and inefficient administration that modern political history has contemplated (modern in the most literal sense: from the French Revolution to our days I don’t think we can easily find a government in any developed country that has shown such amazing level of incompetence, self-dealing, incuriousness and scorn for reality, as told afterwards by its very participants, that joined and were expelled from the corridors of power at an amazing speed, and all tell the same tale of disfunction, cronyism and disdain for the public commonweal). For America’s standing in the world and even the core viability of its political institutions, Trump’s presidency has been an unmitigated, undisputable disaster. A highly revealing one, at that, because for roughly 40% of the population it was his predecessor’s tenure that was a chaotic mess deserving of the long list of epithets I’ve heaped on this one, and it is only the press’ partiality towards Barack Obama (and vicious, vitriolic and wholly unjustified animosity against the bastion of probity that succeeded the mongrel) that has kept a higher percentage of the voting public unaware of all the good things the 45^th president has done for the nation (starting with saving it from the abject forces of socialism, Islamism, unchecked immigration and most likely rampant homosexuality).

The interesting question, of course, is how could that be? how can such a substantial number of citizens of a developed country, that have been subjected to a first class education (nominally) harbor such impressions, plaintively at odds with reality? How can, specifically, the lower strata of the (white) population refuse to see the evident shortcomings of a son of privilege, a spoiled guy that most likely has not worked five minutes in his whole life or produced anything of value (other than a second-rate TV show notionally about putting contestants’ managing abilities to the test in a bogus environment), famous for going through eleven bankruptcies and for stiffing his (working-class) suppliers in the process? not only fail to see such notorious features, but rather the opposite, identify with him and project unto him their hopes, their expectations, their fantasies and their desires of validation and approval? I remember being deeply shocked 24 years ago by the case of Louise Woodward, a 19 years old English nanny that in 1996 killed (accidentally or not) the little baby under her care, eight months old Matthew Eappen, in Boston. What so shocked me is the unmitigated outpouring of sympathy of her countrymen, that never for a single minute seemed to doubt her innocence and generously contributed to the legal defense fund created to ensure she had the best legal counsel money can buy (she was initially condemned for homicide, but had her conviction reduced to involuntary manslaughter, and was freed from jail after less than a year). How, I wondered, could a whole population suspend their moral judgment and rush in defense of a person that, in the best case, had contributed through carelessness and very likely impatience and rashness, to the death of an innocent child? Maybe in part because Louise was lily-white and as English as they come, while the Eappens where foreigners, of Indian origin and thus of a darker complexion. Maybe it was simply because she had a British passport and thus for all Britons she was “one of us”, no matter how ghastly the deeds she was accused of committing, whilst her accusers were clearly “one of them”, whoever those “them” may be…

The fact is, we tend to suspend mightily our impartiality when judging people like us, and even more so when they are somehow from our same tribe, perceived to belong to the same group as us. The same applies to Trump’s followers, obviously. He may be a corrupt plutocrat who is in politics only to enrich himself and his close family, and not give a crap about the rubes that voted for him and about their beliefs, religious or otherwise (this is, after all, the guy that has married thrice, admittedly cheated on at least two of his wives, and had to pay to multiple porn actresses to buy their silence, but that evangelical leaders maintain was for some reason sent by God to righten our wayward ways, go figure…), but they simply can’t see past “he is one of us” and, more important, “is against them”, a vague “them” that each Trumpist can generously detail with the features he despises most of what constitutes their almost mythical “other” (leftists, secularists, abortionist, anti-gun, know-it-all university professors, women who do not conform to traditional stereotypes, city-dwellers, SJWs, blacks who don’t know “their rightful place”, Hispanics in general, gays and whatnot). So he must be a fine person, and all the information about his conflicts of interest, his cavalier decision making style, and the many blatantly wrong decisions and shameful lies he continuously spouts must be a fabrication of the “lamestream” media, engineered by the liberal elite, the “Cathedral”, world Jewry or whatever figment of the fevered imagination of Fox News hosts is carrying the day between the deluded masses of followers that keep on drinking the Kool-Aid (all the while accusing the other side of being the addicted Kool-Aid drinkers for clinging to a worldview opposed to theirs) and consciously or unconsciously filter out any piece of news that may challenge their understanding of how the world works (a world where “the left” -a sinister, secretive and utterly evil cabal- monopolizes every single lever of power and is hellbent on destroying the sacrosanct American way of life through a relentless assault on free markets, gun rights, religion and the belief in American greatness and exceptionalism).

As they say, everybody is entitled to having their own beliefs, but not everybody is entitled to have their own reality, and the beliefs most GOP voters have harbored for the last 12 years (as their flight from “reality-based” information started already with Obama’s inauguration) have been increasingly divorced from anything happening on the real, fact-based world. It may have never happened, or not to such extent, at least, were it not for a media landscape (a TV network -Fox news- and the distinctly American phenomenon of talk radio) that crystalized such (seen from the outside pretty paranoid and unhinged) worldview and catalyzed the perception of belonging to a distinct, differentiated group, easy to segregate from the rest of the country (a rest formed, according to such weltanschaaung, by the dreaded and despised “libtards” that are at the same time all-powerful and unbelievably cunning but, being less than fully human, utterly incapable of true willful action). With this way of describing the American political landscape I don’t want to imply that only republicans (or conservatives of any stripe, which is not exactly the same) are the only deluded ones, or that democrats (or progressives in general) are free of any blame, or have shown in the last decade and a half to be exemplary citizens, acting only with the maximization of the social good as their purest and unalloyed aim and able to the most exacting standards of truth and probity regarding the information they perused.

The latter have their own list of shortcomings and biases, sure, but, seen from the outside, having no dog in that fight, with a hand over my heart… seriously guys (talking to American friends now), don’t be fooled by appeals to false equivalence. There is simply no comparison. What one of your political parties (the republicans), a section of your media (Fox News first and foremost, but in its wake the whole Drudge report, Tiki, Breitbart, all the way down to American Renaissance and Stormfront) and your very own president have been doing is simply so beyond the pale, the stream of bald-faced lies they unashamedly spout comes forth with such frequency, such conviction and such gusto that one is really at a loss of words to see it presented as somehow a “reaction” (measured and reasonable) to the perceived excesses and blatant manipulation of… who or what? The New York Times and the Washington Post? The CNN, MSNBC and CBS? The Daily Kos and the Daily Beast and Huffington Post? You really think that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity are somehow the equivalent of Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Catherine Rampell, Dana Millbank, Max Boot (Max Boot! the uber-neocon!) and Gail Collins? that all of them present a similarly skewed, understandably ideological view of what is going on in the world? that both sides may sometimes stretch reality a teeny weeny bit to make it conform slightly better to their previous expectations, nothing distinguishing one side from the other in that respect? If that is the case, I don’t know what I can tell you, because it is not a matter of us talking a different language, but of us inhabiting different universes (and I’m afraid there is a substantial difference between both: the one I see does exist outside my head, and the heads of those that think like me -assuming there is anyone-, whilst the one you see doesn’t).

As of today, it looks like the whole horror show is about to end in less than a month, with Biden leading in both national and state polls comfortably. But the experience of 2016, when Clinton held a similar lead (less consistent and less impressive as it may have been, it left little doubt in most pundits that it would be more than enough to propel her past the finish line) has everybody pretty wary of what may happen in November, 4^th. Specially because if the election is close enough, given the level of incivility prevalent nowadays, and the doubts in the legitimacy of the whole electoral process sowed by 45^th in his enthusiastic base (that has been bombarded with the message that their guy is leading, and only a massive fraud could rob him of a deserved victory, after all the amazing things he has done for the country in his first four years), the rancor and confrontation that may ensue would surely make the 2000 Florida recount look like a beautiful picnic in the park. But the different possible outcomes of the election, and their implications for America and for the wider world surely deserve a post of their own.

On Religion and Politics (II)

 

In my previous post I ended up almost exclusively discussing the presentation of Émile Durkheim’s concept of society, and the role religion played in it, found in Talcott Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action, hinting that I found such discussion highly relevant for my own work, and advancing that I disagreed with some of its implications. To be more precise, Parsons subscribes to Durkheim’s idea that groups require a common set of beliefs that we would today call religious in nature to solve their internal coordination problems and thus gain stability and viability (as both would be almost impossible to achieve under a purely utilitarian/ positivistic/ materialistic/ deterministic framework). If that were the case, self-identified groups would require their own religion (or pseudo-religion), and thus the distinction between political organizations and religious organizations that I posit would be moot. In discussing why I think the distinction is very much valid, I will also clarify some intriguing challenges posed to me by my much admired teacher Amelia Valcárcel.

Let me start by saying that I can understand why Durkheim confuses political and religious organizations, or at least believes that what applies to one (the set of beliefs) is a necessary condition for the stability of the other (the political group). The origin of the modern nation-state with advanced fiscal and organizational capabilities is very much coeval with the Protestant Reformation, and sharing a homogeneous religious faith (along the lines of the famous phrase elevated to the status of law by the Westphalian treaties cuius regio, eius religio) was indeed one of the conditions of a budding national community capable to stand on its feet in an hostile environment, forged very much in the fire of international strife (whose apex was the Thirty years war, to be duly followed by the war of Dutch independence, the Anglo-Dutch wars, the war of the Spanish succession and the Napoleonic wars). If we think of big “political” groups (organized groups made with the explicit purpose of defending themselves and gaining advantage when possible against other groups whose members could be distinguished from one’s own) we find, apart from whole nations, precious few other than families and dynastic alliances. Ghibellines and Guelphs (factions that grouped a number of Italian city states that preferred to be subject to either the Holy Roman emperor or the Pope, and warred viciously giving North Italian politics its distinctive flavor) may be the only stable instance we can find before the XVI century. But we have already enough examples of multi-religious, multi-ethnic polities (imperial enough, and with enough unity of purpose to have dynasties succeeding each other over vast tracts of land)  in India, Persia, to a lesser extent China, the North of Africa and the Middle East (ruled first by Arabs and later on by Ottomans) to know that religiously united (and racially homogeneous) political units are not the only viable social model.

However, after that historical moment when the main political organization (the nation state) had indeed a strong religious component, soon after the Napoleonic wars that settled the supremacy over the European landmass in the hands of the British, a new form of amalgamation appeared on the stage that led to the creation of political parties not along religious lines (except in some residual, peripheral lands like Ireland), but along another possible dimension of self-identifying: class. Before the social upheaval of early Industrial Revolution, I think it is safe to assume that, at least in Europe, only elites belonged to a “political” organization other than the whole nation, as only them had the means to consciously identify with a subset of society (taking extended family as a model, as had been done since time immemorial in dynastic fights, where different “parties” were simply supporters of different lineages aspiring to occupy the throne, and after the accession had been decided and consolidated the followers of the defeated aspirant to the throne either switched their allegiance or went to exile or to prison). Because the only political groupings were formed within the elites, it is unsurprising that Theda Scokpol identified elite disunion as one of the pre-conditions of revolution and Peter Turchin fixated in intra-elite overproduction (and the consequent intra-elite internecine fighting) as one of the driving conditions of overall social instability in his structural-demographic model.  

But such predominance of elite dynamics was, as I just mentioned, shattered with the bourgeois revolutions (American, English and French) caused by early mechanization (that created a “labor reserve army” that could not count on living from the land, and so had to get itself involved in the fight for the societal surplus that increasing productivity was allowing) and by the rise of a commercial capitalist class that could compete with traditional nobility for social primacy (and thus contest the contemporary dominant reason criterion for assigning status and precedence, namely birth). In such changing conditions (that manifested themselves/ caused the change of the dominant reason, superseding “baroque” reason with the newly minted “economic” reason) the majority of the people realized they had to form new associations to defend their interests against those of markedly distinct social actors. Thus classes were born and, with them, the parties representing their distinctive interests (probably, there is no sense in talking about a class as a recognizable collective actor if it is not accompanied by some sort of representatives that purport to talk in its name and guide its action, that is, if there is not a “party” or, in my more general terms, a political organization that fights for its improvement at the expense of other collective actors).

The question that interests me now is to what extent such parties, to be viable, require a shared metaphysical belief between their adherents. Marxism, probably a paradigm of partisanship (that self-identified by advocating for the primacy of the proletarian “class” which embodied all that was good and truly progressive in history, and was finally undone because one of the weakest links of its founder’s theorizing was precisely that he never really concerned himself with defining with any precision what a class was, and thus who could legitimately claim to be a proletarian) had been denounced since its very inception for constituting a “secular religion” (even a “cult”, by those that wanted to present it as even less rational than it actually was) and certainly almost all known Marxist have subscribed to a set of beliefs (not that different from what Parsons identified as the utilitarian compact: materialism, determinism, and adherence to the “scientific method” as the only way to reach the truth of any question whatsoever, however fanciful their understanding of how science works may have been) that are distinctly metaphysical. Should we conclude, then, that all organizations within society (or at least political ones, as we haven’t said anything about economic and educational ones yet) require for their harmonious and stable functioning to share a common faith, a common set of beliefs about “what reality consists of”, and potentially common rituals for shoring them up?

Definitely not, because political organizations can count on a more powerful unifying force than their sharing of metaphysical beliefs: the defense of their perceived identity (and their shared material interests) against a common threat. During the long stretch of human history when the only organizations of this kind were elite families, it was easy enough (and obviously rewarding enough) to know who you had casted your lot with. As long as the sacrifices required by such alignment were compensated by the benefits you derived from it, you kept your allegiance, and the moment they stopped being so you may consider defecting… if you could (not for nothing were defectors highly despised: it was a temptation always present for those not immediately associated by blood with the ruling family). With the French Revolution we see a different kind of political organization taking shape, as a new kind of group with common interests takes consciousness of its distinct status and its potential to act collectively: the “third state” that purported to represent the whole nation except nobles and priests, and that asserted itself precisely against the two latter categories (also, easy enough to identify). Of course, once the third state had achieved its goals and suppressed any privilege from the erstwhile ruling classes, the infighting begun, as different segments within it not only started trying to arrogate additional privileges for themselves, but required the creation of a clearly defined “other” against which to direct their energies, and that would be needed to help define their own qualities, and thus align their individual member’s interests and actions.

What happened after the revolutionary terror and our days can be understood as the distinct crystallizations of the different subsets of the bourgeoisie (co-opting layers of the peasantry and the industrial workers) to constitute themselves as a separate, easily identifiable group, with its own interests clashing with every other group’s ones, and thus pursuing them in a way that would be detrimental to everybody else (as everybody else was assumed to be doing the same). In most countries, the non-nobles (and non-priests and non-nuns and monks, which the Reformation had already reduced substantially in number) split in an upper class of higher incomes (that, soon, monopolized almost all wealth, which as Saez and Piketty have conclusively shown, is distributed much more unequally than income) and a lower class. Such division had little to do with the Marxian differentiation between capitalists, owners of the means of production, and proletarians, who owned nothing and were forced to sell their work, as in the upper classes we could find a good deal of non-means-of-production-owning professionals: lawyers, middle managers, physicians, teachers and university professors, the higher echelons of public servants and bureaucrats…

Although they formed what Marx (and subsequent follower) would call “the bourgeoisie” none of them were in the least interested in “exploiting the proletariat” or in somehow extracting a somewhat metaphysical “surplus” from their work, as said work had little to do with the source of their income (rather the opposite, being forerunners of today’ prevalent “service sector”, they could only benefit from the improvement in the life conditions of the masses, that would then be able to pay even more for their specialized services -see “Baumol disease”). They certainly did not share a monolithic metaphysical outlook, some of them being Catholic, some Protestant, some Freethinkers, some as atheist as they come. What they shared were tastes, a penchant for good clothes and outer signs of distinction (what Bourdieu would call “symbolic capital”), a desire to live in the most expensive quarters of their respective cities, a high valuation for formal education… essentially, external, easy to grasp signals of belonging to the “right” tribe.

That is, they were the natural members of a fully political (in the strictest sense) “conservative” party, that in each country took different forms and expressions, according to their precise historical circumstances, but that in all cases shared a preference for tradition (as tradition was what had brought them to such comfy and enviable position), for stratification and hierarchization (a natural preference for those that occupy the higher strata and the top of the hierarchy) and for excellence and meritocracy (as those born into privilege tend to think it is, somehow, a position they have “earned” and they “deserve”, even when all they have done is “choosing the right parent”, which obviously is the least chosen thing in life). The rest of the population, that could with similar ease identify themselves as not being part of that tribe (as for belonging it was necessary, first and foremost, to reach certain level of income that was by definition not available to the majority) created one or more equally political “progressive” parties whose professed main value was, unsurprisingly, equality, and which showed little respect for tradition, hierarchy and meritocracy.

The genius of the conservatives everywhere was to realize that in a society ruled by the majority (which, by definition, they could never be part of) they would end up stripped of their privilege and their wealth… unless they could either circumvent majority rule (exacerbating potential conflicts with the openly disenfranchised) or fragment the opposing party. And indeed most of the political history of the XIX and XX centuries in the West has to do with the always unstable balance between the centripetal (“proletarians of the world, unite!”) and centrifugal forces (exemplified by the continuous expulsions of groups from the successive internationals, as well as the breakups between social democrats and communists, anarchists and communists, Trotskyites and Stalinists, Maoists and everybody else…) in what should have been the “majority’s party” (or “progressive party”), but because of those internecine divisions it never truly was (even in particular cases, like Russia or China, where it reached power and consolidated it, it did so through a tiny minority of fully devoted cadres that could never legitimately claim to have been chosen or elected explicitly by a majority of the population).

Needless to say, we are still witnessing the challenges, for progressive parties everywhere, to accommodate and adapt to such centrifugal tendencies, today manifesting themselves in the competing claims of “intersectionality”, as they try to claim the representation of heterogeneous groups that, frankly, may have nothing at all in common (historically disadvantaged racial minorities, immigrants, homosexuals, women, unemployed and less skilled workers definitely constitute a vast majority -hell, just women alone would suffice for that - but as the story of the Democratic party of the USA shows, it is difficult to pander to ALL of them simultaneously, and to have them doing the bare minimum of coordination requested to a modicum of coordinated action, namely voting for their darn candidates).

Again, it is easy to see that such groups (let us call them the “non-elite”, representatives of the majority, although because of the previously mentioned intra-elite competition historically they have been able to claim the allegiance of some scions of the elite dissatisfied wit their prospects within their milieu) do not need to share any kind of metaphysical beliefs to coordinate their actions, and that such coordination will be the more effective (exactly as in the case of the conservatives) the more they see the other part of society presenting a united front “against” them and their interests and their claims (remember that for the member of a political organization, by definition their own claims are just and fair and legitimate, which makes opposing claims from other organizations automatically unjust, unfair and illegitimate, and thus those other organizations must be peopled almost exclusively by bigots, fanatics, morally deficient persons, not meriting the benefits of full citizenship and even not fully human… it is easy to see how dangerous such language and such vision can become!)

So I think we can consider sufficiently proved that we don’t need to extend Durkheim’s analysis too far, and that indeed political organizations can show a very high degree of cohesion, unity of purpose and effective collective action without sharing a religion (be it a set of shared metaphysical beliefs or of rituals that help explain such beliefs to themselves and articulate them in their more day-to-day application). Before finishing today’s post, however, I wanted to apply these insights into the comment of my much admired teacher Amelia Valcarcel about the “great narratives” that are still able to innovate ethically, and thus towards which we can still turn to help meet the new challenges our societies (liberal, technologically advanced, globalized, “postmodern” in François Lyotard’s sense, and “postmetaphysic” according to Jürgen Habermas) are facing. Challenges such as global warming, biodiversity loss and who should pay to ameliorate their more deleterious effects. Such as the kind of treatment we owe to other species (starting with eating them or not). Such as what kind of restrictions should we impose to avoid the spread of a new pandemic, and how we should allocate the means to alleviate it (be it a vaccine or an effective treatment). Such as how to reduce the impact of technological change and increasing automation between the most vulnerable (or the worst prepared) citizens. Such as how we react to a shrinking population in the economically advanced countries and a still exploding one in Africa. You get the point: the world is facing new, unprecedented problems (something Amelia, with her vast and keen historical understanding, knows very well is always the case… biological evolution may find once and again the same solution and apply it to different problems, but as for social evolution, that is seldom the case) and we need ethical innovation to propose solution to all those conundrums that can crystallize in a widely shared consensus, and thus become part and parcel of the social fabric (become “institutionalized”, ultimately becoming part of the law or of universally accepted custom and habit, like we have done with so many previous challenges, from forbidding slave trade to recognizing a basic set of rights to every citizen, regardless of gender, class, faith, age or political persuasion).

Unfortunately, modernity and its latest stage (that she prefers to characterize as globalization, rather than postmodernity) has robbed traditional comprehensive discourses of their strength, and made them unable to raise to the challenge and be credible proponents of solutions in any of those areas. The discourses she explicitly consider exhausted are traditional religion (both the “religions of the book”  -Christianity, Judaism and Islam-, oriental traditional faiths or “new age spirituality”, for which she has little patience), Marxism (both its communist-Sovietic and its socialist and social democrat forms), Capitalism (its free-market, traditional version) and even positivism (as last distillation of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress and social amelioration through the application of the scientific method, which ended up as social Darwinism and a convenient tool for totalitarianism). It could be debated to what extent each of those currents, or meta-narratives, are indeed exhausted and incapable of innovation (and I would direct my readers to my post about how organizations develop along time and are, sadly, corrupted and degraded: how organizations are corrupted), but I want to rather focus on the alternatives that are taking shape since the hinge between the XX and the XXI century: ecologism and feminism.

Because, as my classification of organizations should have made clear, both are very different animals, and thus are likely to follow very different trajectories. Not to beat around the bush, ecologism is a religion, it is not a set of ideas to guide political action (understood as actions that benefit an identifiable set of individuals to the detriment of other, excluded ones), but to be believed, professed, preached, proselytized… it is indeed an alternative grand narrative about “what there really is” (there is this distinct reality: “nature”, characterized by its essential non-humanness, and then there are men, an always negative influence, always corrupting, and for some mysterious and never fully explained reason, entirely apart from the posited “natural order”… unless they accept ecologism and its premises and start living “in harmony with nature”) and what our attitude towards that ultimate reality should be (as in most traditional religions, it should be an attitude of utmost respect and non-interference… ultimate reality is the only source of value, so it is to be adored, reverenced, occasionally appeased and even haggled with, but never exploited or debased or manipulated).

Feminism, on the other hand, is the ultimate political organization: formed by very easily identifiable members (women, which creates a serious difficulty for those that were biologically born as men but want to join, no matter what the cost of the required interventions) that consider that they have not been given the portion of the social product (wealth, riches, status, recognition, respect) they deserve, and are willing to fight for it, obviously taking it from the ones that currently hoard them (men). You can’t get more political than that! And, because of their higher life expectancy, women are already a majority of the population in almost all countries, so in any system of purported majority rule, it should be a clinch for them to seize power and enact the institutionalization of all their claims, shouldn’t it? As it happens, although a “feminist sensibility” is now mandatory in certain spaces (progressive politics, academia, mainstream media) and certainly many claims originated in feminism that once seemed radical (right to vote, unrestricted access to contraceptives and abortion, formal banishment of any limitations in access to any kind of position based on sex, even those, like military combat units, where there may have been a strong rationale for keeping them) have been already incorporated in the institutional framework of most advanced countries, there is no mainstream “feminist party” competing regularly in elections in any of them. And the explanation doesn’t seem to be because they have achieved all their goals, and are content with how things stand, as the public figures we could identify more readily with feminism and that tend to consider themselves the representatives of the movement continuously tell us how far from full equality we still are (that is, indeed, an indisputable fact, regardless of who voices it), how strong the iron yoke of “heteropatriarchy” still is and how many more measures should be taken to advance towards a society that can be said to grant a bare minimum of dignity and recognition to its feminine part (something that the current one, according to these spokeswomen, fails miserably to do, which makes it, I guess, an illegitimate cesspool of sexism, bigotry, shortsightedness and misery).

We may disagree with the level of subjugation currently imposed on women and girls (compared with that thrown on men and boys) and with the reality of said construct (heteropatriarchy), and discuss the urgency of addressing them until we are blue in the face, and we could question why organized feminism doesn’t have a more salient role in electoral politics (the answer would be similar to that given about progressive parties, that necessarily represented more people than conservative ones in most polities: “divide and conquer”, and the fact that many, many women do not identify themselves primarily as belonging to a political group that identifies their needs with those of all the rest of their sisters, but have other, more salient collective identities that they prefer to pursue first), but that will have to wait for another post (that may very well never be written, I’m not that attracted to the issue, and it is a veritable minefield nowadays, with many more downsides than potential upsides). I rest contented with the clarifications I’ve made to the need for religion in political groups that I set out to do. There is another level of political grouping that may be more dependent on shared metaphysical beliefs and rituals (the one identified by Durkheim as the main social unit to study, which explains his fixation on it): the nation. That may indeed merit an additional post that I may sometime write…